


Sutter

by Tarlan



Category: Bereavement (2010)
Genre: Gen, Horror, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-03 16:09:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6617287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/pseuds/Tarlan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They found four bodies in the ashes of the Miller home, but Jonathan Miller wasn't among them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sutter

**Author's Note:**

> Written for: 'Be The First' challenge 2016, Trope Bingo R6 prompt: haunted house, and for the Michael Biehn April 2016 challenge

It was the summer of '94 when his niece, Allison, came to live with them, and it was a summer Jonathan Miller was glad to forget because it changed his life forever. He lost everything he held dear that terrible summer - his family, his home, almost his life too. Part of him wished he had died that day but for the longest time he was blessed with the loss of those traumatic memories. The Police and Fire services had found four bodies in the burned out remnants of his home - two women, a child, and a man. They had assumed it was his wife, daughter, his niece, and him but the man's body had been Billy. Poor Billy who must have made the same mistake of trying to find Allison after she never came home that night.

Sutter had left Billy's body in the den that John had been transforming into a bedroom for Allison. He'd dragged John into the kitchen, believing he was dead from the gun shot inflicted on him earlier when he went looking for Allison at the old Sutter Plant, not realizing the shot had missed all the vital organs. John had been flung backwards by the gun blast, striking his head on a rock and he'd awoken a short time later to a sight so horrific that even now he could only piece together fragments; blood pooling across the floor, flames licking across the ceiling, up the walls, the unseeing eyes of his blood-splattered niece and wife, Karen. Even now he wasn't sure how he made it out of the house before it was completely engulfed in flames, or for how long he stumbled across the fields in shock until he reached a main road miles from the farm. A screech of car brakes, the sharp crack of bone as it struck, and then more blessed darkness.

He'd been in a coma for months following the incident, and during that time the local Police decided Billy had committed the horrific attack on his family before taking his own life, all over wanting Allison. Young love gone bad, they had figured because they didn't have the money to spend on expensive forensic laboratories like the bigger towns and cities. John hadn't been able to confirm or deny their theories, moving from a comatose to a catatonic state for years following. The psychiatrist tried to bring him out but every time he was shown a picture of his wife or saw the color red it was simply too much and he escaped back into the comforting darkness where he could deny it all. In that quiet place in his mind Karen was cooking a pot roast for Sunday dinner, or he was having a pillow sandwich, playing that favorite bedtime game with his little girl, hearing her shriek with delight and laughter.

His little girl.

Week after week he sat in the day room while the world, such as it was, went on around him, lost in memories of the good times.

A single word brought him back to the world; a word never uttered by any policeman or doctor or psychiatrist until it was spoken by a news reporter on the constantly playing television.

Sutter.

With that word came the first shards of memory, slicing through him as keenly as the knife that had brutalized his family. He clearly recalled searching for his niece, remembering her talking of the young boy she'd seen in that the Sutter Plant. Most of the windows were broken and part of the roof had collapsed at one point. Old machinery littered the yard, rusting from exposure to the elements and it was hard to believe anyone still lived there. The local kids believed it was haunted, double-daring each other to sneak in and break a few more windows, but only when Sutter's rusty, beaten up truck was missing from the drive. Although it had been closed down for years, after the code changed and Sutter couldn't afford to upgrade the machinery, John could still smell the stench of fear and death as he thumped on the door. Old Sutter had been a strange one, keeping his son home-schooled or more likely just working him like an unpaid hand. People tended to steer clear of the son, Graham Sutter, who was just a few years difference in age to John. The younger Sutter had no friends, no family, and the hardware store owner was sure the man talked crazy to himself. There had been a rash of disappearances of young girls around the area but John hadn't entertained the idea of anyone local being involved until Allison went missing. His memories fragmented after that moment leaving just crazy images - the flash of blue sky as he was thrown backwards and the scent of meadow flowers before darkness.

Sutter.

Graham Sutter had shot him, not Billy.

Blood pooling, flames crawling along the ceiling above his head, Allison's piercing blue eyes wide open in death, reflecting the flames.

A boy silhouetted by the fire as he walked out of the burning house, a bloody knife hanging from his hand, dripping.

Sutter... and the boy.

"Sutter. Sutter," he repeated.

Over the weeks that followed he slowly came back to the world, examining the fragments of memory like a tongue probing a bad tooth - carefully, fearfully and yet needing to know what had happened on that terrible day. The Police came to see him.

"It wasn't Billy," he said. "It was Sutter. Graham Sutter... and the boy."

Sheriff Waincross nodded slowly, but it was only after he'd been released from the institution that he realized how many years had passed while he hid in a corner of his mind surrounded by only good memories of his family, and of his home. Twelve years, and in that time the boy had become a man, following in Sutter's deranged and sadistic footsteps. So many bodies recovered, mostly of girls who had gone missing over two decades. They exonerated Billy, clearing his name, though there was no one left to care as his father had died a few years earlier, broken and alone.

The State had sold John's land to cover the cost of his long stay at the institute, but even if he still had it he knew he could never go back. He used what money he gained back in recompense to buy a small house in a town two States over and slowly rebuilt his life from the ashes of the old one.

He heard the county decided to burn the Sutter Plant to the ground and bulldozer over the remains, removing every trace of the dilapidated abattoir and its reminder of crimes too horrific to imagine. They cordoned off the land and turned it back into a woodland meadow, but rumor had it on dark nights you could hear the screams of terror carried on the wind, along with the stench of blood, fear, and death.

John never returned to see if the rumors were true.

END  
 


End file.
